Artificial Meat

by Jon Mandle on November 30, 2009

I don’t know how I missed the breakthrough in fish stick technology mentioned so casually in this article from the Sunday Times:

SCIENTISTS have grown meat in the laboratory for the first time. Experts in Holland used cells from a live pig to replicate growth in a petri dish.
The advent of so-called “in-vitro” or cultured meat could reduce the billions of tons of greenhouse gases emitted each year by farm animals — if people are willing to eat it.
So far the scientists have not tasted it, but they believe the breakthrough could lead to sausages and other processed products being made from laboratory meat in as little as five years’ time.
They initially extracted cells from the muscle of a live pig. Called myoblasts, these cells are programmed to grow into muscle and repair damage in animals.
The cells were then incubated in a solution containing nutrients to encourage them to multiply indefinitely. This nutritious “broth” is derived from the blood products of animal foetuses, although the intention is to come up with a synthetic solution.
…
The Dutch experiments follow the creation of “fish fillets” derived from goldfish muscle cells in New York and pave the way for laboratory-grown chicken, beef and lamb.
…
The Vegetarian Society reacted cautiously yesterday, saying: “The big question is how could you guarantee you were eating artificial flesh rather than flesh from an animal that had been slaughtered. It would be very difficult to label and identify in a way that people would trust.” Peta, the animal rights group, said: “As far as we’re concerned, if meat is no longer a piece of a dead animal there’s no ethical objection.”

If they are just using muscle tissue, how are they going to get any fat, blood, bone and connective tissue in there? It sounds like “bland chicken breast” is a best case scenario. I’d rather eat a potato, as long as I had butter or the potato was cooked underneath a nice roast.

I hereby cast my ick vote: vat-grown meat is much less viscerally gross – to me – than the way meat is factory farmed. (Quite apart from any ethical issues, there’s just no way it could be grosser than what we’ve already got.) I don’t know whether Kass has ever weighed in on the factory farming/meat processing issue. But surely if there’s wisdom in repugnance, then reading Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” – to say nothing of Peter Singer’s books – would be conducive to repugnance …

What does Kass have to say about Peter Singer’s stuff? Anyone happen to know?

What Moby said. The flavour of meat is as much about fat and blood as it’s about muscle. This sounds as if it would taste like textured tofu without having tofu’s ability to soak up flavours from marinades and sauces. Personally, I’ll continue to like my meat free meals to taste of vegetables.

@3: The convention in our house is to replace the first letter of the meat represented by the vegetarian alternative with an ‘f’ to avoid the repeat use of airquotes. Thus ficken, feef, fork, facon, etc. For words that already begin with an ‘f’ or for which replacing the first letter would make the word unpronounceable, it’s acceptable to add or replace ‘-ish’ on the end eg. steakish, stuffish (instead of stuffing), scampish.

Neither of these two rules have helped us determine what to call fake fish, unfortunately.

“I’m guessing that Dr. Kass will find this even more repugnant than the public licking of an ice cream cone.”

Kass’s objections to SCNT (no, it really is definitely not “cloning”) boil down to it giving him a bad visceral reaction. At last, a developement for which a visceral reaction is actually relevant! Well, really gustatory, rather than visceral, but at least in the ballpark.

Growing myocytes in a sustainable culture actually has about as little to do with producing cultured meat, as SCNT has with anything like “cloning”. The meat you eat (if you do eat meat) is made up of a lot more cell types than just myocytes, and those cells arranged in a particular structure to form the organs that are muscles. Even if you got all of that right, even if, in other words, you were able to manage organogenesis, there’s still the matter of putting the muscle through its paces, actually using it, to get to the end-product that we are used to eating.

In fact, we don’t really know the details of the embryology involved, but in all probability, you can’t even separate form and function, you can’t even get the form and structure of a muscle unless it starts functioning as a muscle early in organogenesis. Part of that developement we know something about from clinical observation, in that the muscle needs its controlling nerve sending it signals just to keep its structure viable. We speak of a motor unit, the muscle bundle and the nerve ending that goes with it, not just to send it orders, but with this trophic function as well. The muscle atrophies if the nerve dies, and this probably means that the nerve connection has to be there and functioning, sending signals to the developing muscle, to get it to form and develope in the first place. And, of course, the nerve needs input from a central nervous system, and so on, and so on, with the knee bone connected to the thigh bone, etc., etc.

Culturing myocytes isn’t even a small first step to one day being able to do the organogenesis you would have to do to get actual meat, any more than SCNT is even a first step towards “clones” (Whatever they might be. “Clones” aren’t even science fiction, they’re pure fantasy, so fill in the blank as you will.). We’ve been culturing eukaryote, including human, cell lines for some time now, and adding pig myocytes to the list brings us not a whit closer to the organogenesis of muscles. Sure, we’ve shown that you can replace the trophic function of a regular blood supply with a suitable broth, but for the individual cells only. To grow an organ, you need actual vasculature, again, not just to supply nutrients and oxygen, but as part of the direction of growth and developement that gets the organ to grow into an organ of many different cell types arranged a certain way, and not some random mass of random tissue. Growing individual myocytes in a nutrient broth has about as much relationship to growing the muscle organ you would need to grow to make cultured meat — much less cultured meat anyone would like to eat — as my being able to pop the CD of Nathan Milstein playing the Bach Sonatas and Partitas into the CD player has to my being able to play the violin myself — much less play the Chaconne like Milstein.

Take the blandest meat imagineable, and several people have proposed the chicken breast, or the most jumbled and mixed all together, chicken nugget, and you still have something with a very involved microstructure. These cultured myocytes are a liquid.

Actually, though it’s hard to extract much sense from this kind of newspaper story, it sounds like they’re growing them in perhaps in sheets, or more likely in 3D clumps in what’s called organotypic culture. (I’m not sure you could grow a cell type like that in suspension culture even if you wanted to.) I expect getting the myocytes to grow on an appropriate matrix that will make it possible to plausibly simulate the barely edible likes of a chicken nugget or hot dog won’t be that hard. (Might require co-culture with a couple of other cell types though.) What will be hard, I imagine, is coming up with an edible matrix material that isn’t derived from slaughtered animals.

But it’s a long, long, long way from a hot dog to a nice juicy pork chop. Good luck with that, Prof. Post.

Polh and Williamson had this forecast in The Space Merchants, with ‘Chicken Little” , a monstrous piece of chicken breast meat being fed yeast derivatives..Scum-skimming wasn’t hard to learn. You got up at dawn. You gulped a breakfast sliced not long ago from Chicken Little and washed it down with Coffiest. You put on your coveralls and took the cargo net up to your tier. In blazing noon from sunrise to sunset you walked your acres of shallow tanks crusted with algae. If you walked slowly, every thirty seconds or so you spotted a patch at maturity, bursting with yummy carbohydrates. You skimmed the patch with your skimmer and slung it down the well, where it would be baled, or processed into glucose to feed Chicken Little, who would be sliced and packed to feed people from Baffinland to Little America.
From The Space Merchants, by Frederik Pohl (w/CM Kornbluth).
Published by St. Martin’s Press in 1952

You would still need to train the myocytes to grow in with the other connective tissue cell types in a way that at least approximates the actual muscle arrangement. We aren’t even in a position yet to specify what those “other connective tissue cell types” actually are, beyond that general formulation, so we don’t even know what to do in that respect, much less how to do it. At the end of the day, you would have to grow the muscle the same way Mom Nature does, in its embryonic anlage. And part of that anlage would be the vasculature, so the trick of using broth to grow the myocytes isn’t even a steppingstone, or first step. It’s a dead end.

Culturing cells, even a mixture of cells (and we don’t even know what mixture to use), in a broth doesn’t get us any closer to organogenesis. It has nothing to do with what that possible technology would look like, if we ever do manage to replicate with a technology what Nature does in that respect .

My point actually is just that “real” hot dogs (yuck) have precious little to do with nature, either, and thus are a pretty easy target. The cultured “meat” in those would mainly be just a source of protein to mix with whatever other crap holds hot dogs together (just as with the “real” thing). And for the reasons you outline that’s probably about as far as they’ll ever get.

Culturing myocytes isn’t even a small first step to one day being able to do the organogenesis you would have to do to get actual meat, any more than SCNT is even a first step towards “clones” (Whatever they might be. “Clones” aren’t even science fiction, they’re pure fantasy, so fill in the blank as you will.)

OK, we get it, you have decided to use a completely different definition of “clone” from the rest of the English-speaking world. Good for you, I suppose.

The cultured “meat” in those would mainly be just a source of protein to mix with whatever other crap holds hot dogs together (just as with the “real” thing). And for the reasons you outline that’s probably about as far as they’ll ever get.

Eh, I’m suspecting makers of Slim Fast and Ensure and Muscle Milk powdered drink will excite themselves into a froth over this. And, if they have any sense, the makers of “Favored with Meat” Prego sauce will too. Maybe pet food companies. They don’t need to get very far to have a large industrial customer base.

What Salient said. It’s all about the marketing- Real Muscle Cells (TM) as the source of protein in those concoctions will be advertised up the wazoo, and the message will work perfectly on the intended audience.

When Glen Tomkins (convincingly) popped this bubble, a lot of good jokes died in utero. Mine was going to be about whether eating cultured human flesh would be cannibalism.

Which reminds me that I heard Kass give a commencement speech a couple of years ago, which consisted of a long, long list horrible things that will happen in the near future because we aren’t listening to him. My comment afterward was “He left out Soylent Green!”

“My point actually is just that “real” hot dogs (yuck) have precious little to do with nature, either, and thus are a pretty easy target. The cultured “meat” in those would mainly be just a source of protein to mix with whatever other crap holds hot dogs together (just as with the “real” thing). And for the reasons you outline that’s probably about as far as they’ll ever get.”

There’s no reason to think that the immature myocytes from one of these cultures would even impart a beef, or pork flavor, quite aside from the obvious problem of getting a reasonable approximation of meat texture. Nor is it at all likely that immature myocytes would even impart the high protein content that is the nutritional contribution of meats in our diet.

I think you’re confusing mash-ups at the gross anatomy level, which is what the hot dog is, with the much different mash-up at a microstructural level that is the best you could do without organogenesis. The hot dog may be made up of who knows what parts of an actual mature animal, mixed with who knows what vegetable matter and, nowadays, with an overlay of lab-created junk, but it uses the bits of mature animal tissue for flavor and nutritional qualities known from long millenia of cooking with them. Yes, you would have to have a mash-up in which to insert your cultured myocytes, because they can’t, without organogenesis, be grown in distinct meat chunks on their own, but the difference from hot dogs is that there is no reason to imagine that the myocytes will contribute anything to the nutrition or flavor of the mash-up.

You’re absolutely right in charging me with the crime of neologism. But I have to plead self-defense. The rest of the English-speaking world assaulted me first with a word that they all think represents something, which something they all believe they comprehend, which actually doesn’t refer to anything coherent, much less real. I had to try to murder this word to defend myself from incoherence. Failure on both counts, probably.

For all the claims of novelty in the Sunday Times article, the Tissue Culture and Art Project from the University of Western Australia made the growing and eating of vat grown meat the centerpiece of their 2003 artwork “Disembodied Cuisine” which was part of the L’art biotech” show in Nantes. To their credit, the work explicitly explores the ethical issues generated by this technology. They have explored similar themes with a more recent piece “Victimless Leather” in which they grow a miniature leather jacket in a flask.

But Glen, many hotdogs (of the typical cheap kind you find in US) don’t get any of their flavor from the included meat as it is, for consistency reasons. They can already exactly reproduce the flavor and interior texture (but not casings) with soy, so why would they expect to have trouble with this stuff? As noted, it’s an awfully long way from there to a steak.

But why would they care? The processed food market is a huge and growing percentage of US intake. Even if they can’t “get” everything quite right, there’s plenty that ought to work out fine, particularly if it’s cheap enough.

I’m still surprised no one (here, at least) has raised the really knotty issue: is vat-grown pork kosher (or halal, for that matter)? Can Orthodox Jews mix vat-grown meat with vat-grown milk? I mean for vegetarians, this kind of question is easy: killing animals is pretty obviously different from not killing animals (it’s not like PETA thinks it’s okay to kill animals if you don’t eat them). It’s the kosher and halal rules that actually focus on what you eat, and thus ought to produce some really interesting debate.

(of course, Glen Tomkins’ debunking applies to this as much as to the rest of the thread. But since I don’t understand the science involved, I prefer to accept all the most outlandish claims, so as to produce fruitful discussion; I’m sure this sort of deliberate ignorance isn’t at all irritating, in any way, for people who, like GT, actually have some understanding of the subject.)

AFAIK, quorn is more expensive than soy (or, for that matter, actual meaty meat). Given that growing mammalian cells is going to be more expensive than growing fungal cells, it’s hard to see how the economics of this are going to work.

“No they can’t. I like the pretend hot dogs but they’re not the same.”

I’m sure there is a lot of variation. But I have witnessed a blind taste test (ok, hardly scientific, we were having a backyard grill) where most of a dozen people couldn’t tell two brands apart without the skins. Long enough ago I can’t remember the exact brands.

I find it sad that this discussion comes down to a few bad jokes, puns and scientific wrangling.
What is being offered in vat grown meat is to real food as ad copy is to literature.
It is not wrong to make this stuff, only to eat it. It will not have the nutritional value that the meat from correctly raised (for instance grass fed) animals has.
On a culinary level, it is just as bad. It will put replace farmers with corporate engineers.
It is not fat or sugar that is the problem with the American diet, but rather processed food!
This would be the pinnacle of processed food and it will make our lives that much sadder.

Sure, the chemistry wizards of the food product industry could probably use these cultured, immature myocytes in one of their artificial concoctions, but why would they? They would have to use other means, vegetable proteins and artificial flavors, to do the actual work of making a meatless hot dog at least passable (at least with some people, others responding here seem resistant to the idea that one of these things could ever even be passable).

There’s no reason to think that immature myocytes would contribute any sort of meat flavor. No one knows for sure, but it seems more likely that even the mature myocytes in real meat aren’t what gives it its meaty flavor. Everyone seems to agree that cuts of beef, for example, that, like tenderloin, have a lot of myocytes and relatively little connective tissue, are great for their tenderness, something like chuck, which has a lot of connective tissue that makes it unpleasant to chew (unless you slow roast or stew all the collagen out of it), has much more beef flavor than tenderloin. Again, know one really knows, and our ignorance leaves rooms for all sorts of explanations for these differences between chuck and tenderloin, but at the very least, you can’t say that the myocytes clearly are what gives the meaty flavor, and it seems the opposite is the case. And these are mature, developed myocytes we’re talking about in chuck and tenderloin. For all anyone knows, these immature myocytes have no flavor, or even an off flavor that would have to be disguised by the food chemists, as they add in other chemicals to give the meaty flavor that the myocytes won’t be contributing.

And, because they haven’t bulked up with the myofibrils that give the mature myocyte a hefty load of protein, these cultured immature myocytes won’t have much protein to add to the mix. The vegetable protein the industry is already familiar working with would have to be a cheaper way to get protein value into your artificial hot dog.

What you would have in these immature myocytes is an expensive — very expensive until start-up costs are paid, but almost certainly more expensive than the alternatives even after those costs are paid — way to do what the industry can already do better in regards to meatless pseudo-meat. The only thing the myocytes would add to the mix of vegetable protein and artificial flavors these dogs would have to have in addition to the myocytes, is that the marketing would be able to claim that real animal cells grown in a vat are in the mix. Would that claim actually help the marketing?

“Sure, the chemistry wizards of the food product industry could probably use these cultured, immature myocytes in one of their artificial concoctions, but why would they?”

Marketing was my thought, yes. It’s pretty speculative how that would play out though. Given a reasonably cheap process, you can bet that someone will start dreaming about legislation disallowing (some) product differentiation, as has happened in other areas (eg GM foods). How practical all that is I don’t know, but there’s a hell of a lot of money on the table.

You’d probably have more luck getting animals to regenerate limbs, which you could cut off ad inf. As long as we’re reffing obscure SF, think of Cordwainer Smith’s “A Planet Named Shayol.”
But they’ll have to work on the species. Nobody wants to eat lizard tails, and there isn’t much market (outside Asian markets) for frog legs in the U.S.

No. My son was graduating from St. John’s in Annapolis, which I found out was a nest of neocons only after he signed on. Kass used to teach there. When I heard who the speaker was I said “Well, that’s surprising. Not.”

47: Besides Shayol, Smith of course also gave us sheep the size of Zeppelins functioning as drug factories.

The cattle industry will, of course, sue the in vitro beef industry and demand that the labels for the in vitro stuff say things like “Beeph Food Product.” So the Vegetarian Society doesn’t need to worry.

Kass was formerly a tutor at St. John’s, so his invitation to be commencement speaker was more that than that he is a neocon. SJC is, indeed, to some degree a “nest of neocons”, but that’s a product of the history of the Great Books movement in American academia and that Strauss had an association with SJC. Several contemporary tutors were students of Strauss’s. One, for example, was Wolfowitz’s dorm roommate at Cornell and, with him, became entranced by Strauss.

Nevertheless, this neocon history and association has exactly zero influence on an SJC education and approximately zero students would be able to describe neocon philosophy, or Straussian philosophy, knowingly or even unknowingly. Because, of course, as a rule the tutors have minimal participation in class and very rarely inject their own interpretations of the readings. At Chicago, Strauss could indoctrinate his students; while at SJC (during his very short tenure there), he could not.

In general, although SJC students tend toward the apolitical, the student body has been liberal and not conservative. It’s my impression that this has been changing for the last fifteen years, or so—I think this is because its prestige has increased and more parents (and students) are choosing the school for what they think it culturally/politically represents rather than out of intellectual/educational idealism, which is what drew people in my generation and before to the school. Nevertheless, while I think there’s a growing contingent of culturally and politically conservative students at St. John’s, I think they’re still the minority. One of my favorite media quotes about SJC comes from an 80s National Review article which praised the school’s academic program yet puzzled over the fact that the student body is very liberal.

The neocon, Straussian, and cultural chauvinistic subcultures within the St. John’s community have been the objects of my personal crusade as a johnnie—in my opinion, they are detriments to the ideals of the school and the community. But they exist. The fact that the Santa Fe campus has the Eastern Studies MA proves that these viewpoints don’t represent the ideology of the school. On the other hand, the establishment of the Eastern Studies program was very hotly contested and is still resented by the people who hold those views.

If everyone’s right that you have to grow much more than cultured cell lines in order to make something reliably meat-like (and that wouldn’t surprise me, given the little bits my boyfriend has been showing me from the food chemistry book I got him for his birthday) then it starts to seem that vat-grown meat isn’t really going to solve the ethical problem. If we need to grow something that makes organs and is connected to a circulatory and nervous system and also has to exercise to build up the right texture, then it sounds like we’ve got something that’s only one step removed from a veal calf that’s been given the “banzai kitten” treatment.